Affiliate Marketing: Know Your Customer

Being an affiliate marketer is not as easy as just putting up a site on the Internet and watching traffic and money flow in. There are two aspects of making money as an affiliate that need to be considered as you proceed with your affiliate business. First, you need to get targeted traffic to your website. I say targeted traffic because if you get the wrong people to come to your website you could end up paying a lot of money for traffic that does not buy anything. Secondly, you need to learn how to convert your targeted traffic. If you don’t know what makes your customers want to buy then you will never be successful.

The common thread in getting targeted traffic and converting your visitors is to understand their needs and wants. If you do not get to know your customers then you will never understand how to get them to come to your website, let alone how to get them to buy products.

Creating Customer Personas

The first step to understanding your customers is to create customer personas. This is a process of breaking potential users of your product category into a target persona based on their key characteristics and buying considerations and then marketing to them specifically. It is based on the principle that if you are trying to sell to everybody you aren’t selling to anyone.

For example, if you are trying to sell laptop computers, know that there are several different personas that you need to understand. There are business users who use their laptop as their primary machine, who are more concerned with features and less budget conscious. You also have students who want something stylish and affordable. You have to market to each persona differently.

After you segment your customers into personas, you must learn to understand their motivations. Ask yourself why the customer may want the product, and what need the product may fulfill. Also, it is helpful to understand demographic and psychographic data that applies to your target persona.

Demographics are data about who a customer is, it includes age, location, occupation, income, and gender. This is important information to have because it allows you to target your marketing message around the psychographic data that is associated with each demographic. Psychographics describe the attitudes and habits of demographics, such as their buying habits, their hobbies, their attitudes, their interest, and other lifestyle choices. Although, psychographic data will not describe accurately every single buyer who may fall under a certain demographic, it will give you some baseline trends to be aware of once you identify target demographics.

How to Learn About Your Customers

1. Product Advertisements and Websites

A great place to look when you are researching a niche is the advertisements and websites of companies within your category. They have done a lot of the market research and they already know who their target market is anyway. Piggy-backing off of their work eliminates a lot of the work that you have to do and can be very successful.

When you look at product advertisements you should consider which benefits they are emphasizing, what needs and wants they address, how they show the product being used, imagery, who the product appeals to, and common characteristics of the models in their pictures. Most companies will feature people in their ads that are similar to who will be buying their product. Use them to understand who you should be marketing to and what specific benefits of the product you should market.

2. Company Reports

If a company is publicly traded, they release a slew of information that can be helpful for you. A company’s annual report will reveal sales data by certain psychographics and demographics, as well as many other trends that are impacting customers.

You can use Google or Yahoo finance to track all of their reporting’s, as well as news feeds regarding the business. This can be a great way to determine trends that may impact your business as an affiliate marketer.

3. Community Sites

Community sites for your niche are great ways to stay on top of what products are hot and which re receiving the best reviews from users. The best thing to do is to join the sites and be a contributor. It will give you some background into the product that will give you some spectacular insight into the mind of the online buying community. You can learn what features are the most valuable to them, as well as how they make their purchase decisions.

Ultimately, community sites can be a great asset to you because they can essentially write your reviews for you. Look for commonalities in people’s posts to forums and message boards and you can use all of that material to write reviews that really motivate your users to purchase from your site.

4. Magazines and Newsletters

Purchase magazines and subscribe to newsletters so that you can see what content is popular in your niche. Also, when they do product reviews and comparisons, look to see what criteria they use so that you can get a baseline as to what features are the most important to your users.

One great trick is to contact the publication in your niche and get publication, circulation, and ad rates. That will give you better insight into how much demand exists in your field, and how attractive the customers are.

5. Books

When you pick a new niche and you want to better understand your customers, get a “for dummies” guide, or some other book with a general overlay of the niche and learn as much as you can about the basics.

6. Be the Customer

Nothing can be as helpful as going through the process of being the customer yourself. Spend some time shopping for the item that you are buying. Do as much as you can to understand points in the buying process that may cause your site visitors trouble and make your site more pleasant to get through, etc.

Segment and Target Your Audience

Once you have developed personas and learned about your audience, it is time to target them. The first step is to do keyword research with your personas in mind. Start thinking about what they would be searching for, and then use Google and Yahoo’s keyword tools to help you dive deeper into those keyword sets and get a more comprehensive keyword set.

A great tool to help you get demographic information by keyword or url is MSN’s Demographic Search.

When it comes to paid keyword tools. Use tools like Keyword Spy or wordtracker.com to help you, but don’t always believe the hype. They are not always as good as advertised.

The Keyword Buying Cycle

There are three steps to the keyword buying cycle, they represent the types of keywords that people search for when they are either browsing, comparing, or buying products on the Internet.

• When people are Buying they use broad, open keywords to try to find products. If someone were browsing for a new mobile phone an example of this might be, “smart phone”, “cell phone”, ”best wireless providers”, etc.
• When people are Comparing products to buy in the internet they often use words that are more specific, and they often use brand and model names. For example, “Blackberry pearl”, “iPhone”, “AT&T Data Plans”, etc.
• When people are Buying products they use comparison words mixed with action words. This is the most targeted and the highest converting set of keywords. Examples include: “Where to buy a blackberry”, “AT&T Data Plan Contracts”, “Deals on iPhones”, etc.

Customer Matchmaking

Finally, you need to assign marketing campaigns to personas. Take your keyword lists and assign keywords to personas. For example, “Data Plan Contracts” would be attached to the Smart Phone user who is a business user. And “Unlimited Text Messaging” may be attached to a suburban teenager.

Once you attach keywords to personas, you will want to assign those keywords and personas to customized landing pages. Make sure that business users are being sent to landing pages that appeal to business users and suburban teens are being sent to landing pages that cater to suburban teens, etc.

Finally, you must identify negative personas. Or people who are not likely to buy and who you want to make sure are not coming to your site via paid marketing efforts. For example, you do not want current Blackberry users coming to your site that is trying to get people to buy a new Blackberry.

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